The Pentagon’s new war plan against China

U.S. President Obama standing next to the exiled Tibetan leader Dalai Lama, a known counter-revolutionary against China.

On September 7, several newspapers published a signed article by US Vice-President Joseph Biden on his recent visit to China. Under the title “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise”, the Vice-President disregarded his fellow American’s concerns about the extraordinary development of China and presented the reasons why he thinks differently and supports normal relations.

However, Stephen Glain, a well-known US journalist and writer who’s had 25 years of experience as correspondent for a number of US media in Asia and the Middle East, considers that with, “the reduction of the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan – the established objectives in Asia — Washington is not looking so much for a troop withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, but for how to prepare for a possible war against China.”

In his article “The Pentagon’s New China War Plan”, published in mid August, Glain quotes sources specialized in defense issues that affirm the Pentagon is trying to adapt the Air-Sea Battle concept to a confrontation with China.

The publication Inside the Pentagon had previously reported that a small group of officers of the US Navy known as the “China Integration Team” was adapting the tactics of Air–Sea Battle to a potential conflict with China.

The Air-Sea Battle concept, developed in the 90s and codified in a classified memorandum in 2009, is a formula to adjust US military might to the demands of a potential response to the “threats in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf” (a coded way of referring to China and Iran). It supplements the 1992 Guide for Defense Planning, a sort of White Book by the Government, to prevent the rise of any “equal level competitor” that might defy US global domination.

This Guide is a command by the Pentagon to control what defense planners call “global commons”, a euphemism that identifies the arteries of international trade: sea lanes, land bridges and air corridors.

Washington believes that if a foreign power challenges the control over these “global commons” it is tantamount to a declaration of war. According to the Pentagon that is exactly what China is doing in its Southern Sea.

In that same spirit, General Jim Amos, Commanding Officer of the Marine Corp since October 2010, said in May that the Persian Gulf wars were obstructing Washington’s access to the resources it needs to confront a growingly aggressive China. This assertion made General Amos the first US military leader to publicly mention his service’s plans after the completion of withdrawal from Afghanistan.

US mobilization in Asia responds to a study conducted by the Pentagon in the spring of 2001 entitled “Asia 2015” which identifies China as a persistent competitor of the United States bent on foreign military adventurism.

Three years after this study, the US government revealed a plan to create a chain of bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, an obvious containment maneuver addressed at Beijing, as was the nuclear energy cooperation agreement with India signed in 2008.

It is known that the Pentagon has been planning for years to turn Guam into its main center in the Pacific, an initiative so vast that John Pike, one of the leading Western experts on defense, space and intelligence policies and Director of the Global Security organization that he himself founded, has speculated that Washington “intends to run the planet from Guam and Diego García as of 2015”.

In contrast with the US allies in Asia and Europe – says Glain — China is not prone to share national security obligations with a foreign power, much less in China’s south sea where Beijing does not identify Washington as a strategic partner but rather as a direct threat.

Glain describes tense situations in the bilateral relations in which the United States adopts extreme positions instead of contributing to the solution of issues with discreet diplomacy.

The time is yet to come when Washington acquires the sense to understand that its biggest creditor, China, is not a Third World country like so many that the US and NATO have bombed and occupied almost with impunity since the Cold War ended.

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About B.J. Murphy

I'm a young socialist and Transhumanist activist within the East Coast region, who writes for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), India Future Society, and Serious Wonder. I'm also the Social Media Manager for Serious Wonder, an Advisory Board Member for the Lifeboat Foundation, and a Co-Editor for Fight Back! News.

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This article is largely an uncritical regurgitation of Stephen Glain’s original piece and does not question its underlying assumptions nor the broader politics that drive the American Empire and its crimes. Some of the statements in the article were Orwellian in their imperial American bias:

“These US mobilization in Asia responds to a study conducted by the Pentagon in the spring of 2001 entitled ‘Asia 2015’ which identifies China as a persistent competitor of the United States bent on foreign military adventurism.”

It’s outrageously hypocritical for America to accuse anyone else of “foreign military adventurism” given that the USA is guilty of unending wars of aggression from Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya. It’s equivalent to Nazi Germany criticizing others about the horrors of anti-Semitism! As evidenced by its many conflicts, America is hell bent on pursuing military conquest and mass war crimes on a global scale.

“In that same spirit, General Jim Amos, Commanding Officer of the Marine Corp since October 2010, said in May that the Persian Gulf wars were obstructing Washington’s access to the resources it needs to confront a growingly aggressive China.”

More American doublespeak. The USA’s Persian Gulf Wars are significantly motivated by its desire to obstruct China’s access to Middle East energy resources—a clearly hostile act. Indeed, America’s fake War on Terrorism in general has nothing to do with terrorism, or related lies like WMD proliferation, but about aggressively expanding global American domination. This means American invasion of energy-rich nations and its military control and encirclement of strategic nations (like China) and regions around the world.

In the upside down reality of the USA, however, any nation that stands in the way of America’s aggressive pursuit of “full spectrum dominance” (to use a US military term) is demonized as a threat.

American culture is defined by a kind of imperial paranoia, where the USA projects its own aggressive nature onto this or that hated national enemy.

“The time is yet to come when Washington acquires the sense to understand that its biggest creditor, China, is not a Third World country like so many that the US and NATO have bombed and occupied almost with impunity since the Cold War ended.”

This statement is misleading. It obscures how the global financial system and US capitalism operate. All this handwringing rhetoric about China being a supposed “creditor” of the USA distorts the reality that the USA has no intention of repaying the loans it has “borrowed” to begin with. So-called loans to the USA from foreign central banks in general should more honestly be described as a form of imperial tribute paid to the USA.

This is fundamental to the US Petro Dollar being the world’s only reserve currency and the lynchpin of a system that very few people (including self-proclaimed called Leftists) even admit the reality of: US Dollar Imperialism.

Ultimately, Glain’s article represents cynical tactical debates within the American establishment about the feasibility and cost of the USA waging war against China. This is analogous to how certain Americans “oppose” the war against Iraq because it is costing too much in blood and treasure…for the United States, that is.

The terroristic nature of America’s wars (past, present, and future) and the sheer criminality of America’s global dominance agenda are rarely admitted, never mind opposed.